About us

We are always looking for people to help us improve our newsletter so it can get out faster, have more depth and coverage, and generally improve it for our readers, like you. Please join our team by contacting us now, it’s fun! 😉

Mapping

Joost asks in the tagging mailing list about an alternativebarrier=cattle_grid for its electrical equivalent.

John Eldredge noticed on a user was adding the height of peaks in the name=* tag, and asks on the tagging mailing list for community feedback.

User @cumberdumb noted on Twitter that the speed bumps he mapped in his area where mainly in low income areas. SK53 notes that in Nottingham there is only a weak correlation between low income and speed bumps.

Imports

OpenStreetMap Foundation

The license working group (LWG) added point 3.3.6 in the draft of a trademark policy. The LWG tried to dispel the feedback on the mailing list talk (we reported). Further feedback is welcome on the mailing list talk.

The next public OSMF board meeting will take place on September 21th. They will talk about changes to the Travel Policy.

Events

The Mali OpenStreetMap community – in collaboration with the University of Ségou – announces its 2nd Capacity Development Camp in Segou, from 11 to 15 September. Participation is for around 25 students from Geography and IT. This year, officers from Segou townhall will also be trained from 18 to 20 September

Violaine Doutreleau announced on the Talk-fr list that CartOng is organizing a Mapathon in collaboration with several OSM contributors from francophone African countries during OSMGeoWeek from November 12 to 18. The objective is to organize or support mapathons in France and in several countries of French-speaking Africa (Niger, Mali, Madagascar, Senegal, Burkina Faso).

Humanitarian OSM

Hundreds of mappers are currently engaging in HOT efforts to map the regions struck by Hurricane Irma by tracing buildings and roads in Florida and the Caribbean. For assisting the recovery there are planned buildings imports for Tampa and Clearwater, Florida.

2017 Mexico Earthquake Response is an activation of the OSM community across Latin America and the Humanitarian OSM Team to provide map data to assist the response to this earthquake that devastated Mexico. This is an ongoing disaster and in need of mappers and validators for the mapping tasks.

[1] Luisa Janine Griesbaum reported in GIScience News Blog of the University of Heidelberg, that GIScience Heidelberg/HeiGIT updated their OpenStreetMap based Disaster OpenRouteService (a special version of OpenRouteService.org) to the following routing regions North America (incl. Mexico), Caribbean, Bangladesh in order to support the mapping and rescue activities. The data is currently updated every 24h (around 21:00 CET – thanks to Geofabrik).

HOT and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) are working together to map refugee settlements in Uganda. A mapathon was organized and 18 international aid agencies participated.

Brynne Morris from Mapbox writes a blog which consists of the recovery and relief maps that were made for Hurricane Harvey and also calls the community to contribute to Harvey relief efforts and improve the map in communities that are immediately in the path of Harvey.

Maps

OpenStreetBrowser now supports permalinks (as reported last week) which codes your current map position, opened categories and opened map objects. It is now easier to share data.

pnorman would like that ‘place=* tags on admin-relations should be rendered so that errors in tagging are visible. In the discussion on Github, it is proposed that instead the corresponding border relations in the United States should be corrected.

switch2OSM

Nicolas Dumoulin informs the Talk-fr discussion group about discussions with the “Conseil départemental du Puy-de-Dôme”. A Mapping party is planned and various POI should be added to the map.

Entur is a company owned by the Norwegian government tasked with building a multi-modal public transport planner for all of Norway. The travel planner uses OpenTripPlanner, which in turn uses OSM for foot routing.

Open Data

Releases

The JOSM stable release 12712 was published on the 17th of August. It adds Java 9 compatibility, and improves the dialogue for Overpass API download and search based on presets are special highlights. Bogdans Afonins worked on those 2 features as part of GSoC 2017. We want to thank the whole JOSM developer team for their continued efforts to provide us this great editing tool.

Editorial Page – About Us – Contact

What is the idea?

weeklyOSM updates the community, on a weekly basis, about what is going on in the OSM Universe. weeklyOSM is intended for everyone, from experienced mappers to new OSM members. It is created by mappers and OSM enthusiasts. Contributors to weeklyOSM in all languages are always welcome. Due to the enormous workload (52 issues per year, no vacations, no holidays) new languages can only be set up if three mappers agree to cooperate.

The idea of weeklyOSM is to collect relevant OSM news from all over the world, process it and translate it into as many languages as possible. This should help to inform the community as comprehensively as possible and overcome language barriers.

weeklyOSM is independent of all organisations and companies. This applies to OSMF, HOT, FOSSGIS … and all other companies not listed here. Nevertheless, we would be happy if our current issue (in whatever language) would appear on the start page of the Wiki on an equal footing with “Use OpenStreetMap”, “Contribute free map data” and “Software Development”. We would also like to point out that the editorial staff are not subject to OSMF supervision.